Video: Ready to wear: The art of Natick's Virginia Fitzgerald

Sporting a paste-on tattoo of the Hindu goddess Shiva, Virginia Fitzgerald fashions a dress from hundreds of dog tags in her downtown Natick studio that resembles a child's playhouse.

Chris Bergeron

Sporting a paste-on tattoo of the Hindu goddess Shiva, Virginia Fitzgerald fashions a dress from hundreds of dog tags in her downtown Natick studio that resembles a child's playhouse.

She moves barefoot past dresses she's made from glass and eggshells, red licorice sticks and carrots.

A frock made of poems hangs by the door of the Pond Street studio where the Natick artist and mother of two young girls works on The Dress Project she created, carrot by seashell.

Over the last two years, Fitzgerald has created her own artistic line of "sculptural" dresses, stitching clothespins and ideas into the fabric of her deeply personal vision.

Though her daughters, Maya, 10, and Harriet, 7, stuck the tattoo on her back while playing, Fitzgerald said she identifies with its meaning. "Shiva is the goddess of destruction and creativity," she said. "If anything, that's what the dresses have taught me."

For Fitzgerald, making the dresses is an expression of her own "experience as an artist, mother, wife and woman" in today's world.

She has come to regard her dresses as "a multifaceted metaphor for birth, sexuality, a woman's role to family and society: past, present and future."

"As a child I was put in a dress. Lots of women grow up making connections between their prom dresses or wedding dresses and the events of their lives," she said.

Whether using flower blossoms or pumpkins, for her the image of a dress "represents layers of the spiritual, emotional and physical presence of being female."

Describing a dress formed from snaky ropes, Fitzgerald said, "Some people get scared. Some say it's sexy. It makes some people think of S and M."

Since its serendipitous beginning when playing with her daughters on a Maine beach, Fitzgerald's Dress Project has grown into a vocation "with an energy and momentum all its own."

In addition to earlier paintings, she's exhibited her dresses in shows at Gallery 55 in Natick, Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham and recently at the Infinity Pool Court at the Natick Collection shopping center. In 2008 she won an award at the Concord Arts Association's juried members show.

She expects to show new work in four fall exhibits at Bromfield Gallery in Boston this August; Natick Arts Open Studios on Oct. 4 and 5; ArtSpace in Maynard in October and November; and the Dana Hall School from Oct. 20 to Nov. 21.

Raised in Chicago, Fitzgerald was drawn to art as a child, sneaking up into the attic to draw pictures in old sketchbooks. "I was always the kid with the crayons," she recalled.

Fitzgerald earned a bachelor's degree in art at Kenyon College where she focused on printmaking and design. While later studying at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy, she began experimenting with conceptual sculptures including a chicken wire aquarium.

In 1992 Fitzgerald started a wholesale accessory and hand-painted design business, and after seven years switched to freelance illustration for announcements and greeting cards.

Like great oaks and gowns made of yellowing leaves, The Dress Project began with a tiny seed, in Fitzgerald's case, a sticky wad of chewing gum.

"I was playing with Harriet at Elm Bank. We'd finished blowing bubbles and she asked what can we do now. I said we could make art with it," she remembered. After going home and making a little dress from Harriet's already-been-chewed gum, Fitzgerald awaited further inspiration.

Not long afterward, Fitzgerald, husband Steve Rovniak and their daughters were vacationing at Wells Beach, Maine, when a swarm of ladybugs made her wonder childlike about what kind of dresses they'd wear.

"The floodgates opened," Fitzgerald said.

For three days, she scratched dress shapes in the sand. She decorated them with seaweed and kelp and watched the tides "take the dress back to the sea."

"It was bordering on performance art in a way," Fitzgerald said. "I kept drawing in my sketchbook. Talk about an obsession."

Soon, to protest "overzealous fencing" of a favorite spot in Illinois, she made a dress of sticks clinging to a chain-link fence. And she later exhibited her Rose Dress in Gallery 55 in downtown Natick.

In time, Fitzgerald began using new materials to make more complex dresses like her Eat More Vegetables Dress to promote healthy nutrition and her 3,000 and Counting Dress, which used faux dog tags to protest the Iraq war.

After seeing airport screeners confiscate bottles larger than three ounces from passengers, she made her Red Alert Cocktail Dress from bottles filled with red liquid. "That's a perfect example of The Dress Project. I know where I'm coming from," she said. "A lot of people have different reactions. They think it's about recycling or protecting the environment. They should have their own responses. I'm just the conduit."

She stressed her dresses aren't designed to express one specific concept but to prompt male and female viewers to consider them on her own terms.

"I like people to walk around them. Viewers should be able to have their own personal experience," she said.

Near the studio's front door, a sculpted frog, sitting in the lotus position, beams with bulging eyes at pedestrians.

A card bearing Heather Panahi's poem reads: "No, I shan't wear a dress of fine satin or silk. No baubles or ruffles or bows. But a dress that is made out of wishes and dreams, I'd much rather wear one of those."

Fitzgerald's sunny studio combines elements of a Left Bank poet's loft and a San Francisco head shop with jars of beads and burning incense. CDs by Carole King and Sheryl Crow are stacked next to a recorder playing Elvis Costello. A copy of Brides: Real Wedding magazine sits on a shelf next to Emily Post's book "Etiquette."

With several exhibits this fall, Fitzgerald started working on a Sponge Dress, driving to Building 19 in Weymouth in search of large sheets of pink foam. Now she's working barefoot on a new dress made from shards of glass.

"I think I know that I need to create. I didn't know this until a few years ago," she said. "I'm hard-wired to look at things in a different light. The dresses brought it all together."

To learn more about The Dress Project, call 617-596-5179 or visit www.Virginiafitzgerald.com. or www.Virginiafitzgerald.blogspot.com.

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